


Bodies (in Motion)

by delgaserasca



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-23
Updated: 2007-08-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 21:24:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7285279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delgaserasca/pseuds/delgaserasca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian, bad decisions, and Megan. (Not mutually exclusive.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bodies (in Motion)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for numb3rswriteoff.

  
_I don't know what takes hold out there in the desert cold_  
\- Tori Amos, A Sorta Fairytale

 

 

The light that passes through the window is too gray, dusty like the world outside; he stretches awkwardly, turns over and finds the bed empty. She slides into the room, the gown barely resting on her body, already on her third smoke of the day. The air is hot, cloying; the nicotine tests his lungs and makes him regret quitting all those years ago.  
  
She settles at the opposite end of the bed, a little sore he thinks. Long legs, maybe too long; long hair, too, but not dark enough. Too much blond. If he squints he can pretend she's someone else. Maybe. The smoke in the room belies that thought.  
  
"Morning, sunshine." She takes another drag, rolling the cigarette between her fingers. "What the fuck was that all about?"  
  
He smiles, aims for charming. "What, you don't want more?"  
  
"Hell no." She wrinkles her nose, displaces the illusion. "I mean, shit, Ian. I'm not fuck-therapy. You got issues, take 'em elsewhere. I'm too old for this crap." She casts a sympathetic eye over his face, winding her littlest finger through a hole in the comforter. "Who was I supposed to be, anyways? Girl one town over? Ex-wife, maybe?"  
  
He doesn't give an answer, just kicks the sheets out from under his legs and sits up. It wasn't enough, anyway. Marta was too different to be the same, and too smart to be anyone but herself.

 

  


Three images that he remembers, burned into the backs of his eyelids, negatives superimposed on the current day. He’s thinking if he’s lucky, he can make it to El Paso before nightfall, but he’s looking at Marta’s place disappearing in the rear-view and seeing Reeves sprawled out in the backseat. She looks grim and wan, hair clinging to the perspiration on her face. For an instant he recalls how she was under Hoyle’s ungentle care. He blinks; the memory dissipates.

Three images, and they look like this: one, her body through his scope as she advances over the detritus and towards McHugh. His eyes focus on the target just beyond her; details blur between the clean line of her hip and the refuse in the foreground, like the white haze on the horizon just before the sun sets. Two, the precision of her language, and the way she argued bodily with hands and motion, sliding between him and the people around them. Three, the tension around her eyes as she threw her head back, her body shuddering dangerously around his and her hands in his hair, holding too tight just right.  
  
Sweat breaks out across his brow; the sun hits oil on the asphalt, and he's blinded momentarily by the glare. He keeps his hands on the wheel, his eyes on the road, tries to calculate how long it's going to take him to get from A to B. The breeze through the window is just hot air cutting across the lip of the glass but it hits the perspiration on the back of his neck and makes him uncomfortable. He doesn't believe in ghosts, and he knows it's a mirage, but his eyes flick back up to the rear-view and she's still looking at him, face set and stubborn, though tired as though she too is feeling the effects of the unrelenting sun. If she opens her legs a little more, the shadow will lift and he'll be able to see how close the cotton cuts to her—  
  
Curiosity killed the cat, but he turns and looks anyway. Empty water bottles glare back at him, chastising him for expecting anything different.

 

  


There's this story, and it goes like this: there's an idiot who thinks if his feet never touch the ground, he'll never get caught. Ian's out to prove him wrong. There's only so far you can run before re-treading old ground.  
  
There's this other story, and it goes like _this_ : there's this guy, and he's as good as he can be at what he does. And if he'd take pause he'd realise that he's running too, but that running in circles never gets you very far and that if you don't turn to face your foe, he'll catch you anyway. You can't outrun the things you carry with you.

 

  


A month after Marta, and three since he left Los Angeles, and that guy's still running. Except Ian knows the long haul, knows not to pick at his own patience. He spends a couple of nights in his car, and one in a motel. The sun burns away the middle distance; the earth is ashen, dying. No man was made for this kind of heat.  
  
When he wakes, the sheets stick to his skin, and he's half-hard. He takes a drink of tepid water from the tap, spits it out into the sink. The water is bitter inside the hollows of his cheeks; he bites down on the inside of his mouth, and then presses his tongue along the resulting dips and swells. He closes his eyes, remembers half-dreams of limbs eclipsing limbs, a hand to his abdomen pressing down firmly and teeth marks at his wrist, just above the pulse.

He finds his running shoes, doesn’t bother with the lamp. Grabbing the door key and his dog tags from the bedside table, he slings them around his neck before taking off into the dark, the motel lights a blight on the scene. The desert sky is open and inviting. It's past three in the morning, but that's never mattered before. He pushes off against the earth, dust beating against his shins as he goes off-road, counting his footfalls. Every impact shudders through his legs and up through his chest. He forces himself forward, beat after beat. The rhythm should distract him.

It doesn't.  
  
A couple of hours later he's throwing his duffel back into the trunk of his car, fresh shirt on his back and face scrubbed clean of the night's fatigue. The faded mirror had showed him lines of tension around his mouth as he shaved only an hour before, his skin tight across his forehead, but loose beneath his eyes. His cell rings; a lead, at last, something solid, and he presses down on the pedal, is always pressing, pulling out of the lot and down that too-straight road, this time with a destination in mind. He reaches back for a bottle of water, and for a moment his hand stalls mid-air, that moment before contact and he's uncertain what he'll find. The moment passes; he grabs a bottle, pops the cap and takes a drink. He doesn't check the rear-view.

 

  


She says, she says, "Look," she says, "it's not like I'm saying I'm going to go on a crime spree. I'm saying, there’s a line, from here to where she was, and I thought—" she breaks off again, and he waits, takes another sip of beer. She throws a peanut into her mouth, takes her own sweet time. "Sometimes you think something is behind you when you haven't even begun to come up on it." She shrugs haphazardly, defensively, all right-angles and distance. "I'm just saying. I understand how she got from where she was to where she ended up. People think that it's sad, that maybe it didn't have to end that way."  
  
"You don't agree?" And he's genuinely curious because he's been inside so many of these mixed-up minds, but he's never really connected, thank fuck. He knows what she's trying to say - that by the time Hoyle hit LA, she'd signed her own death warrant, but he wants to hear Reeves say it. Wants to hear her affirm what he knew all along.  
  
She shakes her head, hair falling into her eyes. "It didn't have to. But Crystal thought it did. That's all that matters."  
  
That and the bullet, he thinks, but he doesn't say it out loud. Instead, he takes another sip of beer; pictures her arching up beneath him, wet and wanting.

 

  


He orders a beer; it's slammed onto the bar in front of him. The bottle sweats, the cool beads slide down the smoky glass and over his fingers. They react with the heat from his body and, antithetically, feel warm to the touch. Warm, wet flesh comes unbidden to memory and he leaves the beer unfinished, gracing the scarred bar top with a five dollar bill.

 

  


There are certain concepts he understands without having to think; the notion of _physics_ is peripheral, but he understands _friction_ and _air resistance_ , the effect distance has on the speed of a bullet. He understands bodies, too, and the impact bullets have on them. He understands the lean muscle of male lovers, liquor-tainted breath and too much frustration; he understands the smooth delineations of women's bodies, whatever their size or stature. He makes a habit of leaving behind excess, of cutting away glut without a second glance. This is not the life for entanglements, distractions. There can only be the road, the next challenge, the next target in his cross-hairs.  
  
But there can be no evasion here, not of the need he finds burning a hole in his stomach, nor of the notion that he is fuelling himself into his work for the wrong reasons. He thinks of how she wound herself over Fleinhardt, the shorter man cowering under her caress; he thinks about the mixed signals he deliberately handed out, inviting her advances before turning to leave and in turn, leaving her frustrated. He thinks of invading her space, of breaking boundaries forcibly which was dangerous for more reasons than he cares to name. He’d pushed, insisted; she’d resisted half-heartedly, and relented easily.  
  
At night he sleeps and he dreams, waking hot and hurting, fisting himself for some small measure of relief. He comes quickly, but it’s a futile effort; sleep remains elusive. Come morning the tension digs into his back like the memory of her body and he cannot make sense of this, of why she should mater more than the others when it was just sex, urgent and wordless. During the day he struggles to stay awake; at night, he struggles to sleep.

 

  


It’s after Hoyle, maybe a couple of days later, and he’s swinging out of the city and heading back east. He makes it a point not to kiss her, panting heavily into her hair. Her skin is slick against his, the wall hard against her back. He pushes in too early, too quickly; she hisses, but they don’t stall. Instead he’s trying to garner a rhythm but is distracted by her hand in his hair, on his shoulder, nails digging into the flesh there. Light from a window in the back of the apartment plays with his vision, the street lamp’s dirty glow casting colours awry. She looks black and blue; she looks clean and smooth, sweat breaking out against her forehead as he lifts her up, palms beneath her thighs. _Come on_ , he thinks, _come on, come on_ , and she bites off whatever sound she was going to make, pushing back against him. She rolls her hips, he rolls back into her, hard, and she takes it, just rides.  
  
She comes, offers a weak slap to his chest as though in protest, before sagging back against the wall. He picks up the pace again, losing control, losing momentum, their limbs tangled the wrong way. It’s all angles and flat planes; she bites his shoulder. He comes.

If she wasn’t bruised before, she is now.

 

  


There’s this story, right, and it goes like this: there’s a guy who gives into his single vice, and gets trapped between wanting _her_ and wanting _out_. He gives into his vice, and it claims him. There’s no longer any way to relinquish it; it’s his until he finds the thing he wants even more.

But there’s this story, and there’s the truth, and the simple fact is that he doesn’t believe in ghosts, whatever it is that’s haunting him.

 

  


“Reeves?” he asks offhandedly, leaning on formality.  
  
Granger shrugs, shakes his head. “Temporary transfer.”  
  
Ian wonders if he’s imagining the bitter tone in the other man’s voice, and his fist tightens in irrational jealousy. Later, when the work is done, he takes a shower, turns the jets as cold as he can bear and lets the water pound onto his head, his back, his legs. He feels the sense of accomplishment that comes with another job well done, but it’s fragmented and incomplete. Turning the heat back up, his muscles protest but adjust, however slowly. He grazes the palm of his hand over his shoulder. The scar is long gone, the bruise is but a memory.  
  
He goes running, still irritable, and uncomfortable in his own skin. A quarter mile later his trigger finger is itching, eager to release his pent up frustrations. He shoots off a few rounds at the range, taking comfort in the familiarity of the weapons, their solid presence beneath his hands. He tries to think of Marta in the half-light, half-clothed and smoking, but the image transforms irrepressibly. He levels the semi-automatic at the target and squeezes the trigger, once, twice, again. The results are as expected: faultless.  
  
He has to smile at the irony. Chased the circuit all across the country, ending up back where he started, only to find that she was gone. He doesn’t believe in coincidences, but irony, now there’s a bitch. He picks up another clip, reloads. Squares his shoulders. Fires.

 

  


“What are you looking for?” she’d asked him, afterwards. Before. He isn’t certain. (Circles tend to return to points of origin.)  
  
_You_ , he’d considered answering. _You, you, you_. He hadn’t.

 

  


He leaves Los Angeles just as dawn breaks out into morning, and the light pushes gently at the city. He considers stopping in on Marta again; reconsiders when he remembers how well that went the last time. He presses down on the gas, accelerates, lets the air cut through the window and hiss past his ears. When he glances in the rear-view, she’s still sitting there, careless, combative, looking him straight in the eye. He tightens his grip on the wheel and drives on. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. 

 

  


**end.**


End file.
